Now that’s what I call a “rendezvous with history.”
We can see everything from the roof of our apartment building. We can hear the honking of horns, the rhythmic chanting—“PA-SOK, PA-SOK”—and the slogan, “With you, Andreas, we’ll make Greece new.” Dad is seething, Mom just shrugs.
These are dark days, they’re agreed on that. My parents are a couple, and exhibit the fundamental weakness of all grown-up couples: they respond to things nearly identically. If Anna and Angelos stay together, which will pull the other toward his or her way of thinking? Will Anna move toward the right, drink coffee, and swap cheap romances with Martha and Fotini? Or will Angelos become an activist and follow her to France? Both scenarios seem equally unlikely.
The downstairs buzzer rings twice.
“Who could that be, at this hour?” Dad says.
“It’s Anna! I’m going out.”
“Two girls, out on their own in this chaos?” Mom’s shrill voice follows me out the door, fading as I run down the stairs.
It’s Pavlos, and the double ring on the buzzer is our signal for emergency situations. He grabs me and twirls me in the air. “We won, baby!” he shouts. I’m not a baby, I’ve got on my leather jacket with the punk pins, but I like the way his eyes are shining. He wants to go down to Syntagma to be in the thick of the celebrating crowds. I climb onto his motorbike for the first time — today I’m not scared, the atmosphere is electric. Other drivers call out to us, make the victory sign, all because Pavlos has a flag in one hand. Everyone is shouting, “The pe-ople won’t forget — what the right has done,” and honking their horns to the rhythm. That’s something I can shout, too, it’s a leftist slogan. My heart is pounding; I finally feel as if I belong somewhere.
The rhythmic chanting of “PA-SOK, PA-SOK” imprints itself on me, working its way inside as we drive down to Syntagma, like a refrain by Siouxsie and the Banshees, or the jingle from a Coca-Cola ad on TV. It’s as if the word “PASOK” has come to mean love, or peace, or justice, simply because there are so many of us, and we’re pounding together on the horns of our cars, and we all want for something to change. As if I’m not myself, no longer the same old Maria, I feel my mouth open and that same cry pouring out: “PA-SOK!” A shock indeed! Pavlos drives the motorbike up onto the sidewalk, turns around on the seat and takes hold of me in an entirely different way, pulls up my shirt and bites me low on my belly. His eyes shine in the dark.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says.
He spreads a sleeping bag on the roof of his building, behind the water heater. It’s warm here, the cars down below are still blasting their horns, and we’ve put it all on pause. We’ve switched gears from a major revolution to a minor one, though actually I couldn’t say anymore which is which. It hurts, a lot. I feel like my vagina isn’t there, doesn’t exist, or that Pavlos is excavating it as he goes, digging blindly and insistently with his gyrations. A narrow space, all membrane, fights back. I clench my teeth and tell myself that millions of women all over the world do this all the time. To make the torture end, I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him closer, willingly abolishing the slight distance between us. There’s no sound, no pop of a champagne cork. But I know: I’m not a virgin anymore.
It’s nothing like my experiments in the bathroom, the circular motions, the absolute happiness. Erotic Harmony is perfectly clear about this: It can take a little while, even a long while, for a young woman to learn to enjoy lovemaking. It says nothing about the breaking of the hymen, the relief of that moment. The passage from humiliation to freedom.
It says nothing, either, about how Aunt Amalia must feel.
“Why do you girls never button your coats? You’ll catch cold!” Aunt Amalia greets us at the door. I smile. Ever since I stopped being a virgin, I feel like I’m the aunt and she’s the niece.
“We have to find her a man,” Anna says.
“Are you kidding? She’s fifty years old.”
Anna insists that we need to sit her down, do her makeup, buy her a new suit with a slitted skirt, and take her for a walk in the Field of Ares.
“She’s not a dog, Anna! She’s a person!”
Anna pays no heed. She whirls into the living room like a tornado and pinches Aunt Amalia on the cheek.
“Okay, get dressed!” she cries. “You’re coming with us.”
Aunt Amalia calls her a handful and a spoiled brat behind her back, but to her face it’s as if Amalia is a schoolgirl and Anna her teacher.
“Where could you girls possibly take me? I’d spoil your fun.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going to find you a husband!”
Aunt Amalia laughs.
“See? She likes the idea!” Anna says, winking at me. We make Aunt Amalia put on some lipstick, take her by the arm, one on each side, and pull her out into the street. Anna is in a fabulous mood. She points to this man or that and says, “Do you like that one? What about him? On a scale of one to ten? A six? Come on, Amalia, you’re too harsh. How about eight?”
Aunt Amalia is wearing a woolen dress with little black doo-dads sewn onto it. All her clothes are made from dark fabrics. She toys with her corsage and gives a nervous laugh. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her so happy. She looks the men up and down as if they were vegetables at the farmer’s market, just as Anna wants her to. Then again, isn’t that how she looked at them her whole life long? The king was a perfect ten, an enormous, ripe hothouse tomato, and beside him the poor, scrawny bunches of parsley could only hope for a five at best. For some inexplicable reason I’ve got tears in my eyes. I whisper to Anna to stop the game.
“What’s wrong with you?” she says. “It’s never too late.”
But it is. If you don’t discover your vagina at fifteen, you just keep putting it off. You grow old before your time, with your taxidermied birds and your creaky, worm-eaten chairs.
•
It’s November, we’re wearing turtlenecks and are opening a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on the grass. We cry “Santé, amour, fraternité!” and sip from Antigone’s best glasses, the ones hordes of famous Greek and French revolutionaries have drunk from. The Field of Ares has never known such luxury. Today I’m turning sixteen, and Anna organized a surprise picnic: chèvre sandwiches, champagne and a cake from the Metropolitan Bakery. I blow out the red candle and some crazy guy passing by laughs and claps his hands maniacally.
“Great, now get lost,” Anna calls to him. “Beat it!”
He doesn’t budge. Anna shouts, “I’m coming for you!” and gives him a threatening look, and the man runs off, emitting a series of inarticulate cries. Perhaps in his madness he understood something I haven’t yet? She’s my best friend, but I don’t trust her anymore. She spent her entire allowance on my birthday, and today she hugs me and shouts, “Happy birthday to my best friend!” But tomorrow she might give me the cold shoulder. That’s just how Anna is. Odiosamato.
The burn from Angelos’s exhaust pipe has faded into a scar. But it’s still there.
“Any perversion associated with the reproductive system will affect an individual’s psyche, social standing, intellectual development and general progress. Perversions of this sort can cost us dearly in our lives. For that reason, we have to be very careful about what kind of people we choose to spend time with. .”